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Formerly-Wasteful Bob—previously known as Wasteful Bob—was cleaning out his MS IE bookmarks when he ran across this link on the Q&A site Quora.com: “How do I cut cloud costs with AWS?”

Now that Bob was reducing his monthly AWS costs significantly by using ParkMyCloud to program EC2 instances to go off during slack periods, he didn’t really need to click the link—but he did anyway to see if there were any new and useful ideas.

What first struck Bob was how involved, complex and wordy some of the answers were. Perhaps because the respondents were mostly technical folks, Bob thought, they went into more detail then necessary. He scanned further and saw that most of the answers contained 4+ bullet points putting forth various “principals” and emphasizing “deltas,” “sizing” strategies and laborious-sounding “discount” assessments—not to mention encyclopedic details on how to leverage the full range of AWS options (Spot, RI, etc.).

For fun, Bob did a word-count on each answer:

300 words

177 words

158 words

117 words

74 words

37 words

Why, Bob wondered, did optimizing his AWS environment and reducing his AWS spending have to be so complicated? He thought of it like this: About 70% of his bill was EC2. More than half of the instances were non-production (test, Dev, QA, and staging), so they did not need to run 24×7. So the answer really boils down to finding a simple and inexpensive way to automatically program your instances to turn off when not being used.

At that instant, Bob happened to catch a few specifics from the 37-word answer—the shortest one on the page:

One of the simplest ways is to turn off unused instances! ParkMyCloud is basically a programmable on/off switch for AWS EC2 instances. Like NEST for the cloud. www.parkmycloud.com.

Formerly-Wasteful Bob was experiencing what researchers call buyer-validation. While his peers were stuck with their traditionally complicated, labor-intensive and time-consuming methods of scripting and Reserved Instance management, he felt smart for having selected ParkMyCloud. With ParkMyCloud, Bob needs to spend just a few minutes a week (if that) to reduce his AWS spending by 20% – 50%.

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About Jay Chapel

Jay Chapel is the CEO and co-founder of ParkMyCloud. After spending several years in the cloud management space, Jay saw that there was no simple solution to the problem of wasted cloud spend - which led him and co-founder Dale Wickizer to start ParkMyCloud in 2015. Before that, he spent 10+ years with Micromuse and IBM Tivoli, a provider of business infrastructure management software. After an acquisition by IBM, he led the successful sales integration and subsequent growth of the IBM Tivoli/Netcool business in Europe. He also held several regional and worldwide sales roles in Switzerland, the UK and the US. Jay earned both a BA in Finance and an MBA from West Virginia. Those few hours a month that Jay’s not busy with ParkMyCloud’s growth and success, you can find him on the ski slopes, on the soccer field, or on the golf course often accompanied by his three kids.
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